This entry might be short. After all, there is not much to tell, and that in itself is part of what is to be told (?). Did that make sense? Read on, maybe it will make sense afterward.
So, we got to Bialystok, because we were planning to go to the Biewiczka (or something like that) primordial forest that straddles the border of Poland and Belarus. The first night we were there we went a-wanderin' down to the core area, where we saw a respectable church, and a palace, but nothing overly notable. We also noticed a large congregation of people in a park and ended up wandering through what turned out to be a ... household fair? There were tents devoted to furnaces, hot tubs, tools, etc. It was really just rather random, but we did get some enjoyment out of a lifesize foosball game, with people as the players tied to the poles, and the attractive girls some of the companies were using to get people to their tent. After a quick wander through there and the adjacent park, we went back to our hostel and read/putzed around until bed time.
The next morning is when we were planning to get up and go to the forest. We arrived with little time to spare, though, and could not find the bus that was supposed to be leaving to the forest. We asked about it but nothing ended up coming of it, so the entire reason we came to Bialystok was shot! Not wanting to let the time go to waste, though, we spent that day wandering Bialystok further, only to realize, a little bit to our dismay, that there is not all that much to see in Bialystok. We went to a mall that we found for a while and did some random wandering, and that night ate at a pretty good Italian place, but that was about it. You can imagine that by the next day we were pretty eager to move on with our trip. We got our train tickets to Vilnius and got onto what we thought was our train. Turns out we were wrong! So, after getting ourselves back to Bialystok from the random town we ended up in, I made some inquiries, mostly to people who did not speak English, and found out that the next opportunity we had to get to Vilnius was at 2am. The current time was approximately 11am. You can imagine how stoked we were!
Of this there is not much to tell. We spent way too long at the mall, way too long at the train station, and way too long in a park near the two. It finally got to 2am and we were pretty happy to see the bus roll around the corner. The nice thing about buses, too, is that you have someone to ask if it's going to the right place. You don't always get that on trains.
So I'm not very good at sleeping on moving things. Sometimes I can manage trains but not usually buses or airplanes. This was no exception. So after laying awake for most of the train ride I began to talk to the only other person awake, a middle-aged Latvian man. We talked for a while, and he mentioned many things about his daughters, seeing as how they were around our age and also in school. At the end of the trip, he invited us for coffee with his daughters. We thought this was a little random but accepted because he seemed like a decent fellow and we always like meeting locals. We parted ways to get some sleep and see the town a bit first, though.
Liam and I found our way to our hostel (after a little bit too much searching due to a faulty guidebook), and were happy to find out that we could check in early so that we could get to our beds for some sleep. We woke up and saw the sights in Vilnius. It's got a very pretty and extensive Old Town with more to see than many we've been too, and we also saw a massive Church made out of an old pagan temple and climbed to the top of Gediminas Hill, where we climbed further up a tower and got a fantastic view of the city. We then called the number the fellow gave us, which was his daughter's, and it was getting a little bit late now, so she told us we should come over for supper instead. They came and picked s up at our hostel a short while later and brought us to their house, where they had a veritable feast prepared, with turkey meatballs, sausage, potatoes, strawberries with creme fraiche, cake, coffee, beer and wine. We were a little surprised, but pleasantly so. They were also good people to talk to. Both of the older daughters knew four languages each, the dad knew something like six, and they had a lot to say on all kinds of subjects. I think at times I felt a little bit outclassed! Anyway, it was a great evening and the fellow dropped us off back at our hostel at the end.
The next day we got up and went to the Museum to the Victims of Communism. It is a really cool museum that tells the history of Lithuania under the communist yoke. The place is contained within the actual old KGB headquarters, and the basement still has all of the original rooms, where prisoners were kept, tortured, interrogated, and killed. One especially interesting room was just a lowered floor with a raised pedestal in the middle, where they would make prisoners stand, filling the floor with ice cold water, so that the prisoner could not doze off or they would step into the water. That night we went out for dinner with the girls we had met last night, but only after they took us around some other parts of the Old Town that we had not seen before, such as the University and the Presidential Palace. We got a coffee afterward but then the girls had to go so we went back to our hostel.
The next day was and the next entry will be about Klaipeda, a coastal city of Lithuania where we spent a few days.
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